Spotify Continues to Lead the Industry

Apple's numbers are in and they are not impressive. There are 6.5 million paying subscribers now for Apple music.

That would be a good result for a small startup but a closer look at the numbers shows just how much trouble Apple is in.

First, Apple has around 800 million active credit cards on file; so their music subscribers represent under 1% of that. When you consider that for Downloads, Apple's itunes had over 80% of the entire market, it is quite a troubling sign that their streaming is growing so slowly.

Secondly, Apple has about 94 million iphones in the USA. Their music subscribers thus represent about 7% of that - another dismal number.

As downloads continue to decline, Apple is facing a very serious problem.

Spotify continues to show stronger growth rates than just about anyone, and there is no reason to see that changing. Apple is so used to being number one, they may not yet have the kind of "guerilla warfare" mentality they need to win a come-from-behind battle.

To succeed in Music, Apple needs to get more aggressive. They should try to acquire and control every resource they can, including buying other music streaming companies; buying our URL MusicStreaming.com; and upgrading their service to higher quality, meaning bit rates (Apple has a lower bit rate than Spotify, while Spotify is lower than Tidal; and Tidal is lower than Pono which has FLAC quality). At some point, if Apple wants to claim to be the quality leader, then they have to actually havequality. People are more sophisticated now; it's just not enough to put your focus on 'lifestyle' kind of commercials instead of tangible things like bit-rate quality.

There are potentially some better ways to monetize music that we have discovered - that no one is yet doing, and therefore Apple could, potentially, take the lead in that area. Whomever buys our URL, will get our monetization advice included at no extra cost.

The dominance that Apple had in downloads is going to end; so far, it appears that Apple might not have the kind of organizational expertise needed to win, when coming from behind in music streaming.